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So, I've got a question that I'm hoping someone can shed some light on.. Over the weekend, and for the first time, I plugged in our Kuro Plasma Pioneer Elite screen into a relatively new PC that I built last March (with an Asus P8Z68V-Gen3 mobo) with the built-in HDMI port. I can get audio/video without issue and have been using XBMC & NPVR with it for a few hours as an experiment.. However, we went to eat dinner and I shutoff the plasma display but left the PC on.. When I came back I found the audio was completely gone but the video was OK. I went into the system tray (this is Windows7 Home Premium) and fooled around with the audio volume and while I could move the slider nothing came out (it did not say "no device" or similar)..

So, this particular display claims to be mapped to the Realtek HDMI output when plugged in (unlike our much older other Pioneer Plasma (2 gen?) that comes up as a PDP-R04) -- I don't recall whether that device is marked as the default or not..

So, I read somewhere else that if your audio device is marked as the default and then you power it off and later back on, Windows will have marked the default device as unavailable and possibly switched it to something else.. I'm trying to make heads-or-tails of all of this as I just want a box that works when I turn it on without fooling around -- namely that IF I turn off the display without turning off the PC and come back later, audio would be nice!

Any ideas on this would be greatly appreciated..

I should note that I'm running the latest audio drivers from the Asus website but ran across a suggestion to get the drivers from the chipset maker direct and not use the mobo vendor's as they're frequently outdated.. I did check the Realtek site over in europe and that seems to hold true -- Asus has 5.9.x drivers and Realtek has 6.01 drivers.. I will update tonight to see if it helps..